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A footnote to the Ida Benfey Judd discussion:
I've found documentation that she began her annual Mark Twain quotes
contest in 1927. I have a list of every winner from 1927 to 1935, and
the rules for entering, and some of the winning quotes (the cash prizes
totaled $100 during the Great Depression). I also found a letter she
wrote in 1933 on Mark Twain Association letterhead with her (and her
husband's) Central Park West address and a blurb for the Mark Twain
quotes contest. Her signature and closing on this letter occupies the
bottom half of the letter-sheet, scrawled in enormous letters measuring
one inch tall and her signature six inches long: "Joyous greetings/ Ida
Benfey Judd."
From this evidence (and that quote somebody posted from Lyon's diary
about her kissy visit with Twain) I conclude that she was an eccentric
wealthy woman running a one-woman operation using the "Mark Twain
Association" name prior to the group founded by George Ade and others in
1941.
Or, as Twain, might have concluded, "She was not quite what you would
call refined. She was not quite what you would call unrefined. She was
the kind of person who keeps a parrot."
Kevin
@
Mac Donnell Rare Books
9307 Glenlake Drive
Austin TX 78730
512-345-4139
You can browse our books at:
www.macdonnellrarebooks.com
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